B-Sides: Zarkorr Invades! Earth Sings!
Steve Barton
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Earth is attacked by a giant space monster. Good aliens trying to save us from this city-smashing behemoth decide only the most average man on Earth can stop it. A holographic space girl two inches high appears in a postal worker’s kitchen to recruit him to save the human race. Thus begins the ballad of Zarkorr! The Invader.
Giant Japanese monster movies made a resurgence in the 1990’s with a slew of new Godzilla and Gamera movies. Hollywood was prepping a big screen Godzilla movie. Charles Band decided to get in on the daikaiju action by creating an offshoot of his Full Moon production company specializing in giant monster movies. Monster Island Entertainment was born in 1996. More like stillborn since Zarkorr! The Invader was the only film released under this label. (Footage for a second film titled Kraa! The Sea Monster was shot, only to get completely retooled into a kiddy flick and released under Band’s Amazing Fantasy Entertainment children’s movie label.)
It’s kind of easy to see why this was an ill-fated idea from the get-go. Think about how low budget Charles Band’s movies were even in 1996, and then imagine trying to make a Godzilla movie on that budget. The design of Zarkorr was pretty cool; too bad you don’t see very much of it. There’s only about five total minutes of giant monster action, and the footage of what little destruction it causes feels so detached from the corny comedy plotline you’d swear it was all shot before they even wrote the script. Probably because it was!
You can see a good deal of those special effects along with additional b-roll footage in the closing credits set to the tune of a humdinger of a theme song. Like the movie itself, the “Zarkorr” song straddles the fence between enjoyably bad and bad bad. I’ll let you decide. It is a truly distinct theme song; that much there is no denying.
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Categorized:B-Sides
